Paris Noir, the show recently launched at the Centre Pompidou in Paris brings together over 150 artists, writers, and thinkers of African descent associated with and responsive to the cultural, political, and intellectual milieu in Paris between the establishment of the quarterly Présence Africaine in 1947 and 2000. Displayed on the sixth floor of the museum, the show emphasizes the varieties of communities which were created by people living in or coming through Paris during this fifty-year period. Included in the show are four pieces by the late Pennsylvania-based artist, William R. Hutson, the Jennie Brown Cook artist in-residence at Franklin & Marshall College, who passed away in 2022.
Présence Africaine, founded by Alioune Diop in 1947, offered an outlet for the philosophical and revolutionary ideas fomenting in Paris and elsewhere in the wake of anti-colonial movements in the 50s and 60s. It brought together writers and thinkers from Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and the United States. Many Americans moved to Paris after World War II, both to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the GI Bill (which funded education for returning veterans) and to gain a respite from the ugliness which marked the battle for civil rights in the United States. Although Hutson was too young to avail himself of the GI Bill as many of his friends and colleagues did, he came to France in 1963 and crisscrossed back to Paris from different European locations over the next several years. He maintained a vital relationship to France for the rest of his life.
At the center of the exhibition is a room devoted to Edouard Glissant, whose concept of “Tout-Monde,” with its emphasis on interconnectedness and change across time and space appropriately anchors this exhibition. Alicia Knock, Head of Contemporary Art at the Centre Pompidou and this show’s chief curator, stresses expanding connections and circulations around racial, aesthetic, and other formations. The layout of the show follows a loose spiral shape, reflecting the snail-like arrangement of the city of Paris itself. This structure emphasizes the fluidity with which relations are made and sustained in living communities on the ground.
Hutson entered the Parisian world from rather distant beginnings. Born in 1936 to a modest family in San Marcos, Texas, he grew up in the segregated south. He joined the US Air Force on the day he graduated high school, taking one of the few jobs available to a Black man at the time. While in the Air Force, he registered for a few correspondence courses in art and began developing a visual consciousness. His move to Paris in the 60s was a deliberate one: to become a painter he felt he needed exposure to Europe, and to France, in particular. While based in Paris, Hutson knew and engaged with a range of other artists such as Beauford Delaney, Sam Middleton, Ed Clark, Herb Gentry, Roberto Matta, Wifredo Lam and many others, all artists included in Paris Noir.
Although glad to live in Paris and to escape the turbulence in the USA in the late-60s, Hutson, like other Americans of African descent, still had to struggle with racial disparagement. In the over 800-page long journal Hutson maintained from 1962 until 2022 (on 22×30” D’Arches paper) are entries made in Paris in 1968. One says: “Running round Paris hiding from police. . . . Several times almost cornered by CRS swinging night sticks… Arrêt sale negre!” [Stop, dirty Negro!] By no means were Black Americans embraced warmly, even though they may have felt more welcome than they did back in the USA.
Barring a few early works in the figurative style, Hutson was compelled by abstraction despite limited opportunities for abstract painters of color to exhibit their work. In 2004, Hutson curated an exhibition at Franklin & Marshall College which brought together the work of several artists of African descent who had focused on abstraction throughout their careers. He did so to emphasize that there were Black abstract painters who had been and were consistently overlooked by art galleries and museums. Happily, that is no longer the case and now many artists are represented by the top galleries.
In 1969, at the American Center in Paris, Hutson showed work alongside Sam Middleton and Ed Clark in Noir 3. Included in the 1969 show and now in Paris Noir is the provocatively titled piece “The Nigger Tree II.”
Although made before Hutson traveled to Africa in 1971, his imaginings of the continent were already shaping his work. This piece shares a vocabulary with the other pieces in the Pompidou show, made after Hutson traveled to and lived in Gorée (1976-77) and Lagos (1974-76).
Like many of Hutson’s paintings, the clear edges of quasi-architectural forms in “Study for a Black Painting” (1970) suggest coherence and organization while remaining resistant to explanation. Strange, mobile forms in color float on a glossy surface, offering no clear meaning or narrative. Held in the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection (Asbury, NJ), this luminous painting draws in the viewer, even though there is little on which to anchor. “The View from Iwaya Road,” completed while Hutson lived and worked in Lagos, Nigeria more fully develops a language reliant on African symbols.
African-American cultural contributions and history are increasingly under threat in the United States. This exhibition underscores that Black intellectual and artistic life has always been transnational, diasporic, resilient, and expansive. Even as anti-immigrant sentiment is on the rise in many countries, including France, this show affords a timely intervention. Alicia Knock and her assistant curator Marie Siguier are to be congratulated. They have mounted a rewardingly complex and capacious show, even as the Pompidou readies for closure for extensive renovations.
Several galleries and museums in Paris are showing works which echo Paris Noir. At the Galerie Clémentine is a show by the London based Ghanaian photographer, James Barnor, whom Hutson knew well in London in the early 60s. Alongside Barnor’s photographs of Hutson in his studio is a piece seen in Barnor’s 1966 photograph, which is now on view at the Clémentine.
The same gallery offers an exhibit of photographs by the late novelist William Melvin Kelly, whom Hutson first met in Paris in the 60s and remained close to thereafter. Ripples expanding from Paris Noir are already being felt, and connections which may have become less visible are being rediscovered by the visual arts community.
Paris Noir is at the Centre Pompidou until June 30, 2025.
About the Author
Padmini Mongia is Professor of English at Franklin and Marshall College. She is also a writer and a painter.
